The state of Pozières shocked Bennett’s men. ‘The village is absolutely frayed to the ground, which in turn is a succession of deep shell holes,’ wrote Lieutenant Matthew Abson in his diary. ‘There are many dead bodies, German and Australian in varying stages of decay.’52 Bennett’s biography explains how he set up his battalion headquarters in a pine-covered shelter after his team dragged away the stiffened corpses of dead Germans that blocked the entrance. After setting to work — with their only light coming from a flickering candle stuck to a makeshift table by its own grease — exploding shells continually showered them with clods of earth, occasionally snuffing out the candle.53 Hurricane bombardments, lasting half an hour or more and increasing in intensity, fell upon the Australians throughout the afternoon of 25 July.
John Harris, a schoolmaster at the prestigious Church of England Grammar School in Sydney, had participated in the midnight attack on 23 July and suffered under the German bombardment on 23 and 24 July. He was evacuated from Pozières and hospitalised on 25 July, shaking and suffering from tremors. What was this psychological sickness?
Since early morning on 23 July, Harris had busily walked the trench line, encouraging his troops and supervising the consolidation of the battalion’s position. The schoolmaster’s leadership must have comforted many of the Grammar School old boys scattered throughout the 3rd Battalion.54 Howell-Price, in his report on operations, singled out Harris, commending his energy in organising the consolidation of the position, writing that ‘he inspired and gave confidence to his men by cheerfulness and his disregard of danger’.55 Harris must have been completely exhausted when he collapsed sometime on 24 July. The 3rd Battalion history gave some sense of the strain he had worked under for those three days. It explained how Harris summoned his platoon sergeants to a meeting to discuss the deteriorating situation, only to arrive late and find them blown to bits; and how, on the evening of the 23 July, his troops — braced for a German counterattack — almost opened fire on some shadowy figures across the road, who turned out to be other Australians.56
Harris spent most of 24 July digging his boys out of collapsed trenches. Late that afternoon, without warning, an exploding shell pushed a barrow-load of bricks over him. Something must have snapped; he seemed to suddenly break down. Although his commander needed every officer he could muster, he had no choice but to send Harris back to battalion headquarters for a rest.57
Harris’s experience was common among the Australians sheltering at Pozières. Across the entire front, initially dozens and then hundreds of men descended into a catatonic state marked by symptoms of confusion, paralysis, tremors, anxiety, and shaking. ‘I have had much luck and kept my nerve so far,’ explained one soldier. ‘The awful difficulty is to keep it. The bravest of all often lose it — one becomes a gibbering maniac.’58
At about the same time Harris collapsed, other troops began wilting under the strain. Major Verner Rowlands of the 2nd Battalion reported to the 1st Brigade headquarters that he had eight men praying to be seen by the doctor. ‘The remainder are in a shocking state … they seem to be nearly in a state of exhaustion.’59 Some observers compared the phenomenon to that of a boat’s mast creaking and then suddenly snapping under the strain of a torrid gale. Soldiers referred to ‘broken’ or ‘shattered’ nerves, and the medical fraternity called it neurasthenia, but its most common and evocative label was ‘shell shock’.
By Tuesday 25 July, shell-shock cases had reached epidemic proportions, enough to threaten the Australians’ hold on the village. On Saturday, there had been a handful of cases reported; on Sunday, 31 cases. On Monday, when the barrage shortened its range and pounded the village, 70 cases. By the end of Tuesday, there were over 200 cases, representing 20 per cent of all casualties that day. Shell shock also affected British troops: they had had 1387 reported cases in France for the whole of 1915, yet from July to December 1916 it escalated to over 16,000 cases.60 The rise was almost certainly linked to the increased frequency, length, and severity of the bombardments throughout the second half of 1916.
Some officers, such as Captain Hubert Harris of the 2nd Field Artillery Brigade, didn’t try to diagnose soldiers, but removed them from the line immediately. ‘I do not consider it mattered much if the case was of stark fear or genuine “shell shock”,’ wrote Harris in his war memoirs, ‘the former had to be evacuated to the ambulance because of the disastrous morale effect of a badly frightened man on his comrades.’61 Australian medical officers quickly had to work out how to treat such victims. They recommended shorter periods in the line to combat exhaustion — which they considered the largest contributing factor to breakdown under shellfire — but this wasn’t always practical under the German barrage. It became clear that there needed to be a way to treat these men within the confines of the village. One medical officer improvised his own homespun remedy, short-circuiting the need for evacuation: ‘When men reported to me saying they were shocked, I made a comfortable rest for them; endeavoured to reassure them.’ He then administered a mix that included morphine. ‘I repeated this in half an hour. At the end of three quarters of an hour I was able to rouse them and the men would volunteer they felt better and would return to the line.’62
After collapsing, Harris was sent to battalion headquarters, where he rested as best he could; he could hear the muffled explosions of shells outside the dugout. When his rest period was up, he stepped groggily out of the dugout, just as a German shell exploded close by. ‘It killed a man that had just stepped out of the dugout in front of me and knocked me down to the bottom of the steps with the dead man on top of me,’ he recorded in his war memoirs. It ‘terminated my further interest in proceedings’.63 Harris had severe shell shock; he never returned to the line.
Mild shell-shock cases were evacuated to the corps rest station at Vadencourt.64 Severe cases, like Harris, were evacuated to casualty clearing stations, which were out of artillery range. The two stations initially allocated to I Anzac Corps — nos. 3 and 44 British casualty clearing stations at Puchevillers — had six operating tables filled continually day and night for the first three days of the Pozières battle. After an extended rest, many soldiers returned to the line, but those with severe symptoms of ‘nervous breakdown’ were hospitalised, and recovery could be slow.
Shell shock did not discriminate. It could take hold of the brave, the shirker, the young, the old, the officer, or the private. Iven Mackay had been surprised when one of his battalion officers, decorated for bravery on Gallipoli, was found cringing in the corner of a dugout throughout the German bombardment. Mackay treated the man with the utmost respect, easing him out of the trenches and putting him in charge of a training battalion far from the fighting, where he might slowly recover. But he never did — even the explosion of training shells would set him trembling. When he eventually returned to the line, he broke down in a matter of days.65
Even if men did not display the classic symptoms of shell shock, it didn’t mean they escaped its effects altogether. For several days after a battle, the noise of shuffling feet, an opening door, a passing cart — in fact, any movement at all — sounded to many like an approaching shell. ‘We found ourselves flinching involuntarily on and off all day,’ said one soldier.66
Even though Harris escaped Pozières, the war seemed to have destroyed him. He explained in a letter to his school magazine that after Pozières he lived a disconnected kind of existence as a sort of hanger-on to the division: ‘I have never been quite right since P[ozières] and the H.Q. people have made that the reason for putting me on odd jobs.’67 In the summer of 1917, Harris returned to his battalion. His personnel dossier indicates that his ‘nerves’ gave way again when his company passed through a barrage on the way to Polygon Wood in Belgium in September 1917. When shells exploded close by, Harris fell to the ground, shaking uncontrollably. He was evacuated to the field ambulance. The examining medical officer remembered him as suffering from tremor of the
hands. He ‘only answered questions slowly and after some delay’. His commanding officer found him to be imbecilic; all he could say was that he was ‘feeling stupid’. Harris was diagnosed with shell shock for a second time.
Harris’s file tells us that his commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Donald Moore, believed the man could no longer stand the strain of action. ‘Harris broke down in a similar manner the day after he led his company in the attack upon Pozières,’ he explained in his report to Hooky Walker. On reviewing the situation, Hooky agreed.68 Harris forfeited his command and, after a short stint in Egypt working at a reinforcement camp, applied for discharge. He returned to Australia a few months before the war’s end. There was probably no marching band or heaving crowd to greet this war-damaged soldier; he would likely have quietly slipped back into civilian life. The war spawned thousands of John Harrises, who silently bore their terrible burden through the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. For them, perhaps the war never ended.
By Tuesday evening, the Australians had moved the front line forward about 600 yards by linking most of their forward posts, which they had dug the previous day; however, they lost many men in completing the task. Those soldiers still alive were too exhausted to repel a counterattack, should it come. Forsyth’s relieving 2nd Brigade had only been in the line for 24 hours and had already suffered 1336 casualties.69
As a result of the German bombardment, an enormous plume of dust, smoke, and gunpowder shrouded Pozières. ‘Terrible day for our boys,’ said Lieutenant Ernest Holmes, 1st Division Artillery. ‘They got shelled to pieces in Pozières … Never witnessed such heavy shelling in my life as I saw today.’70 Bean said Pozières was pounded more furiously than before: ‘It seemed to onlookers scarcely possible that humanity could have endured such as ordeal.’ The plume of red and black dust hanging over the village reminded him of a wild Broken Hill dust storm.71
Why couldn’t the British guns knock the German guns out of action? Urgent pleas for counter-barrages were sent to divisional, Reserve Army, and then Fourth Army headquarters throughout the day, but nothing happened. The artillery observers claimed they couldn’t direct counter-fire because of the dust plume over the village — and because the German guns were well hidden in Courcelette, on the reverse side of the Pozières ridge.72
What the Australians garrisoned at Pozières didn’t realise was that its own artillery was stretched to breaking point and starting to buckle under mismanagement. David Horner’s book The Gunners described how, after nearly a week of incessant firing, the buffer springs of the 18-pounder guns were nearly worn out. As a result, guns recoiled metal on metal, and had to be pushed back into their original firing position after each round. Their spring coils failed, and could only be returned to their original length by using up to 50 gunners and a thick rope to stretch out their compressed coils. These problems with the 18-pounders placed an extra load on the howitzer batteries. ‘I had to cover the whole front of the brigade,’ explained Captain Jeremiah Selmes of the 101st Howitzer Battery, ‘and from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. when I ceased to fire, I had expended 1672 rounds, completely using up all available ammunition.’73
The divisional ammunition columns also struggled to keep up supply to the field guns. They were already making up to three trips per day and working through the night. Three teams of two horses pulled the ammunition limbers. The limber drivers maintained a frantic pace, galloping all the way — particularly through the crossroads registered by the German guns. The potted roads sometimes snapped the horses’ legs, and shellfire killed drivers and horses. The worst part for the drivers was seeing their limbers run over the bodies of the dead, although they realised this was the price to be paid for getting the ammunition through. Between 20 and 29 July, these columns would supply a staggering 80,000 rounds of 18-pounder, almost 9000 rounds of 4.5-inch, and over two million rounds of small-arms ammunition. 74
Haig, aware of the haze, visited Birdie at his Contay headquarters and demanded that he immediately replace his long-time artillery adviser, Brigadier-General Charles Cunliffe-Owen, with the more experienced Brigadier-General William Napier, as Cunliffe-Owen had ‘no experience of our present artillery or methods’.75 Birdie complied. For Haig, it was another frustrating example of the old Gallipoli gang not appreciating the vital importance of artillery on the Western Front. ‘I would be failing in my duty to the country if I ran the risk of the Australians meeting with a check through faulty artillery arrangements,’ he later wrote in his diary. Disturbingly, months earlier Bean had predicted that the artillery would let the Australians down frightfully some day, writing in his diary: ‘It’s a puzzle to me why Birdwood keeps these people.’76
The early hours of Wednesday 26 July were spent trying to capture the remainder of OG1 and OG2, as Gough had ordered. The attacks were feeble, half-hearted, and unsuccessful. At daybreak on 26 July, the Australians braced themselves, wondering whether the Germans would bombard them for a third day straight. At 7.00 a.m. the bombardment came: gas shells musty with chloroform, sweet-scented tear shells that made eyes water, high-bursting shrapnel, and huge black clouds from exploding 5.9-inch shells.77 The Australians crawled out of their trenches and into shell craters to escape the bombardment.78
Casualties mounted among the 2nd Division troops, who had just entered the line to relieve the 1st Division, while remnants of the 1st Division wondered whether they would make it out of Pozières alive. Carl Jess recorded the toll upon his officers with sobering regularity: ‘… Lieutenant Wright, brought in — shell-shock; 1.50, Lieutenant Hamilton, wounded; 2.45, Lieutenant Sutherland, wounded; 3.30, Lieutenant Hoban, wounded (lost leg since).’79
Hooky, sensing the imminent destruction of his once fine division, ordered that one battery of the 1st Anzac Heavy Artillery be solely devoted to counter-barrage work. Its commander protested, claiming that it would cost him his precious daily quota of shells. Hooky argued that his troops must be protected, and appealed to the commander of the Reserve Army’s artillery for help, but he claimed he was already doing everything possible to suppress the German bombardment. It must have frustrated Hooky that most batteries sat silent, their forward observing officers claiming they were unable to direct fire owing to the haze. 80
Back in the village, heavy shelling rocked Gordon Bennett’s headquarters, which was made from pine logs. ‘My men are being unmercifully shelled. They cannot hold if an attack is launched,’ Bennett reported to his commander, General Forsyth. ‘The firing line and my headquarters are being plastered with heavy guns and the town is being swept with shrapnel.’81
‘Losses now heavy, many men are buried and suffering from shell-shock,’ reported Iven Mackay that evening. ‘Stretcher-bearers and runners very tired.’82
Late in the afternoon, a flurry of German rockets and flares curved into the sky. Soldiers panicked; officers doubted they could hold against a German counterattack. Sheltering in Gibraltar and with only one telephone working, Carl Jess phoned brigade headquarters, pleading: ‘Consider relief imperative as we could not resist attack if this is the preparation of it. 6th and 8th battalions endorse this.’
Brigadier-General Forsyth considered Jess’s desperate message. Pozières would be his last battle. Something inside of him must have snapped; he replied firmly, ‘Men must and will fight if necessary.’83
Like Forsyth, Brigadier-General Sinclair-MacLagan and his staff at 3rd Brigade headquarters were utterly exhausted, having worked continuously, sometimes in suffocating gas masks under the poor light of acetylene lamps. One officer observing their work said they appeared to be walking in a trance. Tired runners, who snatched whatever fitful sleep they could before being called upon to deliver another message, clogged the dugout’s passageways. One runner, unable to cope with the strain, blew his brains out.84
The three days between 24 and 26 July were possibly the most trying ever experienced by Australian soldiers. The troops suffered three days of intensive
bombardment that was arguably the heaviest yet seen on the Somme. Lieutenant Colonel Elliott, who fought with the 12th Battalion throughout the war, described the shellfire as the worst he had ever suffered.85 In the coming days, the burden of fighting under these trying conditions and seizing the important OG lines would transfer from Hooky Walker’s spent 1st Division to the relatively fresh troops of the 2nd Australian Infantry Division.
chapter eight
The Price of Glory
‘A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of coloured ribbon.’
— Napoleon Bonaparte
Just before dusk on Wednesday 26 July, Major-General Gordon Legge, commander of the 2nd Australian Infantry Division, departed his temporary headquarters at Rubempré and motored toward Hooky Walker’s divisional headquarters at Albert. In a few hours, Legge would assume command of the Pozières sector, relieving Walker and his chief-of-staff, Thomas Blamey, who was ‘tired to death for want of sleep’.1 As Legge hurtled toward Albert, his 5th and 6th brigades progressively relieved the 1st Division troops, while his third brigade, the 7th, remained in reserve at Tara Valley.
The shattered 1st Division troops waited impatiently throughout the night for Legge’s troops to relieve them. Donovan Joynt was thankful when the 24th Battalion relieved his 8th Battalion at about midnight, recounting in his autobiography that his handover was quick and brief. ‘I only waited to point out, “there’s your front. I can’t tell you where my flanking posts are — I haven’t got any and haven’t seen them.”’2 The relieving troops noted that Joynt’s men were ‘nerve shattered and very shaky from the effects of the heavy bombardment’.3
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